Copyright ÂŠ 2008 by Special Projects Press, Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen
All rights reserved
Conceived and designed by Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen
Introduction by Stephen Cleary
The Glass of Water by Wallace Stevens is reprinted without permission,
and is from the collection Parts of a World.
Printed in the USA

On September 10th, 2008, a 96 year-old house on SW
Cable Avenue in Portland, Oregon caught fire and burned
down. The house was inhabited by Stuart Baxter, its owner of twenty years, and a couple, Anna Gray and Ryan
Paulsen, who rented the first floor apartment. It was also
the home of a tabby cat named Brillo Box and a black dog
named Maggie.
Everyone is safe. A lot is different.

Fig. 1

To our family and friends, and our friendsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and
familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s friends, for picking us up again.

‘Bad Juju’
Introduction by Stephen Cleary

‘Bad juju.’ That was what my wife said when I opened the
envelope, reeking of the immutable merging of smoke and
water and containing remnants of the fire; family photographs
melted together on one end, the binding of an ominous flip
book defying our attempts at interpretation. Our eleven yearold daughter would repeat the mantra ‘at least Maggie got out,’
every time the subject of the fire was brought up.
That mixture of smells always brings me back to my childhood,
when my friends and I would chase the sound of fire trucks
on our bicycles. We did this a lot, although we usually failed
to find the source for alarm. Our pumping legs did take us to
infernos in progress, where the spectacle was punctuated by
the cracking of weakened support beams, breaking glass and
exploding aerosol cans. Other times, we would stumble upon
a fire’s aftermath, mesmerized by the devastation and apparent
randomness of misfortune. Looking back, there were many
fires, although I’m not sure why. Maybe, because it was the
1970’s. The combination of cocktail parties, cigarettes and
shag carpeting made for a particularly volatile mix.
We stopped chasing fire trucks after being scolded by a
distraught victim who we found sifting through the ashes of
8

her former home. I should have offered my help, but instead I
became more frightened by scenes of catastrophe.
The heightened superstition that my wife displayed on my
opening of Ryan and Anna’s fire letter may be a result of the
abundance of tragedy surrounding us during the last couple
of years. Bad things come in threes and we don’t dare get too
close to whatever it is that summons these tribulations. It is
human nature to want to know the reason for a tragedy, if only
to reinforce what we already know, to make us feel that we are
in control. But reason is of little help when our irresponsibility so often goes unpunished, our minor mistakes bring about
madly disproportionate suffering, and the blameless suffer and
die daily.
When we are confronted with fate, we are confronted with our
relationship to faith, which is either comforting or not. We may
find serenity in organized religion, or share an abstract painter’s
distrust in the ability of words to describe our amorphous, yet
passionate belief. Others turn their back (and who can blame
them) on concepts so loaded and unreasonable, but it is exactly
those traits that make the concepts persist, allowing them to
permeate even our secular culture.
As children, we were curious and wanted to understand the
devastation of tragedy, to be assured that it wouldn’t happen to
us. As we grew older, curious but emboldened, we taunted fate
by playing with sundry fires. As adults we grew wary, wondering how we survived when others did not and realizing that
we would never understand, or be assured. We count on our
families and friends. And our faith, in whatever form it takes,
becomes something truly compelling when acquaintances and
strangers come to our aid.
9

Fig. 2

Fire Drafts

Ryan Wilson Paulsen

People want to be included in uncomfortable situations. I
couldn’t be more thankful for that. It means people will step
forward and help, become part of a story. The reason Anna
and I were able to get back on our feet so quickly wasn’t just
because of help from people we were close to. Distant acquaintances stepped forward, offering gifts and assistance in
a variety of ways. Understandably, everybody also wanted to
know the details of our situation. Since the fire, I’ve racked
my brain trying to find ways to talk about it. The usual questions are ‘what happened?’ and ‘how are you doing?’ The first
part is easy. I just say: ‘the fire started in the dryer.’ That’s
usually a satisfactory answer since dryers are one of the most
common causes of house fires. The second part of the question though, isn’t as easy to answer. What I’ve wanted is a
concise way to explain my thoughts. Instead, all of the conversations I’ve had about the fire seem to be disjointed and
muddy, usually ending with me saying something like ‘…we’re
still here.’ Being able to categorize the fire with words isn’t my
ultimate goal; what I seek is an easier way of expressing my
sentiments without inevitably giving the awkward answer.

12

Most people use the word ‘awful’ when trying to express their
sympathy. Awful might be a good word to describe what happened, but it’s not perfect. The word awful is connected to the
ideas of awesome/awe-inspiring and dreadful/terrible. Fire,
with its inherent beauty and inevitable destruction could easily
be considered awe-inspiring, but only from an observer’s perspective. Unfortunately, I was not just a casual observer. I was
invested and directly affected. I could use only the dreadful/
terrible part of the word, but that seems to fall flat when I take
into account that there were a few good things that came out
of the fire.
What I really want is to turn the whole story into a joke, like
how Lucy ‘Left Eye’ Lopez setting her boyfriend’s home on
fire has become a joke, or how the burning bush can cleverly
represent the hot air of religion, or lay the groundwork for a
joke about syphilis. I haven’t permanently excluded the possibility of writing a joke from this mess. I am still too close to
truly laugh at it. James Thurber famously coined the phrase
‘tragedy plus time equals humor,’ maybe I just need a bit more
time to be able to laugh over my house burning down.
Within moments of our arrival on the scene people were
already expressing their condolences for our tragic loss, but I
can’t exactly say that the event was tragic either. However, in a
moment like that it’s not easy to explain to a consoler why this
event wasn’t one way, without having another way to frame it
after telling them they’re wrong. Do I explain all the intricacies of the event, enlightening people to the fact that, while
the fire was impactful and memorable, it doesn’t quite meet my
standards of a tragedy? The 1944 Hartford circus fire killed at
least 160 people. One of those was a little girl who has never
been identified. That’s a tragedy.
13

My grandmother was in the audience the day before the circus
fire. She and her parents had driven down from Holyoke,
Massachusetts. I wonder if they liked it? Because the next day
the story of their circus experience was usurped by its proximity to the infamous fire.
I have always wondered if my great-grandfather regretted
not going to the circus a day later, because he liked to chase
fires back in Holyoke. Sort of like that joke about lawyers
chasing ambulances to find clients, only he’d chase fire trucks
so that he could find photogenic disasters. A few of his photographs survived our fire and I still have them. There weren’t
any lawyers approaching us in the aftermath of our fire. The
local news was just leaving when we showed up at the house.
(Thanks to them I can watch footage of my house burning
every night before I go to bed.) Interestingly though, contractors began showing up, offering their condolences and their
business cards, even before the firefighters were even done
with their job.
Our fire wasn’t exactly heartbreaking either. At least not in the
way your heart breaks when you hear about Roy Orbison’s fire
in which he lost two sons. Yes, I lost the guitar (fig. 17) my
parents gave me for my twenty-first birthday; 1 my computer
burned along with all of the backed-up data; (fig.19) almost
all of the art I’ve made became nothing more than a wet black
mass, and our wedding photographs were destroyed along with
many of our wedding gifts, (fig. 20). Both Anna and I had
corresponded for years with each other and artists such as Joe
Macca, Rose Lifschutz, Mack McFarland, Amy-Ellen Trefsger,
I must admit that the loss of this guitar led to the acquisition of my father’s old
guitar, a 1957 Martin D18. He bought it used when he was in college for about $300.
I have been asking my father for this guitar since I moved away from home, 10 years
ago. I have always loved the perfectly tinny sound of it. Thank god for pity.
1.

14

Brad Adkins, Shane Paulsen and many others, that whole archive was destroyed as well. We lost tools and art supplies and
collections of things. (figs. 7, 9, 13.1, 15, 16.2, 21). We lost
all the stuff that you don’t think about needing until you don’t
have, (fig. 2, 10, 11).
(I should note, that if you are ever to have a house fire, ours
is just about the best kind you can have. Nobody died in the
fire (that is no people and no animals.) We saved most of
our clothes and dishes. After carefully separating each page
and making sure they were drying evenly, we were able to save
most of our books as well. We even have heroes for the narrative: the Aldersebaes’, a neighbor couple (whom we never had
the pleasure of meeting before this incident,) broke the door
down with a baseball bat and saved Maggie our dog.)
The burning of our house wasn’t liberating, like John Baldessari burning his paintings. And it wasn’t a gesture that could
have social or political implications like the act of self-immolation committed in 1963, by Thích Quang Duc, a Vietnamese
monk. Lighting oneself on fire is a more common practice
than you might assume. In mid-17th century Russia, the clash
between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Old Believers,
spurred by reforms to establish uniformity between the Greek
and Russian Orthodox churches, resulted in whole villages of
Old Believers burning themselves in protest. They called this
baptism by fire.
Self-immolation was used by Alfredo Ormando to protest
the classification of homosexuality as a sin, and has been used
numerous times in protest of wars. Norman Morrison, Roger
Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, and George Winne Jr. all
lit themselves on fire in protest of the Vietnam War following
in the footsteps of Alice Herz who was the first American to
do so. She was 82 years old. The Soviet invasion of Czecho15

slovakia inspired a group of young men to publicly burn themselves in resistance. Graham Bamford lit himself up in hopes
that it would focus more attention on the conflict in Bosnia.
And in 2006, in protest of the war in Iraq, Malachi Ritscher (a
former member of the band Big Black) set himself ablaze on
the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. In some ways, I find it
comforting to imagine our house as a self-immolator protesting the encroaching towers of condominiums and English ivy
that threatened to clog our street.
I wonder if our fire could even be considered a gesture, given
the fact that we never wanted it to happen. (Doesn’t there
have to be some sort of intention to qualify it as a gesture?)
Without intention it seems like so much less, as if one can
never get beyond retrospective interpretation. This can be interesting, but somehow it has less impact when you know there
was no grand plan.
There is a recurring plot line on the television show Law and
Order. After beginning an investigation, the detectives find
that the victim has not been murdered, as it was originally assumed, but rather died from drugs, accident, or by their own
hand. Whenever they bump into this twist the detectives find
someone to blame anyway, positing all types of shaky moral
theories about how a suspect’s actions have ultimately led to a
wake of victims. While I like groaning at the ridiculousness of
the constructed scenarios on television, I don’t really want to
act them out in real life. I don’t want to create a murderer, or
someone to blame for this turn of events in our lives, it seems
like a lot of work.
Maybe bitterness is the key. I recently came across a book by
Ryan Gander called Loose Associations and Other Lectures. In it
he talks about putting a call out to writers for texts on bitter16

ness. Nobody had anything to submit. A few of the people
he asked even took offense to his request, as if Gander would
only ask if he thought of them as a bitter person. This makes
me think of all the assumptions and projections that dictate
how we end up viewing something. Stuart (our landlord and
much-loved upstairs neighbor) has been compiling a list of all
the coincidences regarding the fire, perhaps as a way of explaining it. I must admit, when I think about how Maggie the
dog had taken to sitting in the laundry room (where the fire
began) in the month leading up to the fire, or how the theme
of the T.B.A. festival (fig. 16.1) that night was ‘Burning Down
the House,’ I am almost convinced that there must have been
a reason. In Gander’s book he also writes about how having a
chip on your shoulder can be a horribly heavy burden, but if
you have one on each shoulder a balance is attained. So, while
the fire is obviously a chip that I’m carrying on my shoulder
right now, maybe what I should do is look for a second.
Growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, (the insurance capital
of the world) I was taught to believe that insurance was a
scam. My father likened it to betting against yourself. About
the same time, Pete Rose was banned from baseball for life,
for betting against his own team.2 So, from a young age I
wouldn’t even consider betting against myself. I have never
purchased insurance unless the law required it, and in those
instances I’ve done so with grumbles and curses. Now, for the
first time in my life, I can actually say I cursed myself for not
having gotten insurance, lucky for us we had what I call social
insurance.

2. Although, I have believed that Rose bet against his own team my whole life, (and almost everyone I have asked in recent history has believed the same) there was, in fact,
never any evidence that could actually prove this.

17

Insurance has been on my radar lately, at least peripherally. I
spent a good portion of last year researching the poet Wallace Stevens (fig, 23). I spent time in Hartford and visited the
places he spent his life. I went to insurance row, Farmington
Avenue, and The Hartford, a colonial fortress where Stevens
worked, making sure insurance was available to protect every
aspect of American life. The linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf
sold fire insurance at the same insurance company as Stevens.
He invented the theory that language affects one’s cognition,
actions, and perception of the world. He credits working in
the insurance industry with helping him to realize his theory.
After many years of handling mistakes in insurance claims,
Whorf found that they mostly were results of a discrepancy
between the language used by the insurance company and that
spoken and understood by its clients.
It might have been Whorf himself who dealt with the
Wadsworth Atheneum’s controversial 1936 fundraiser, ‘The
Paper Ball,’ which was an event entirely dressed in paper. Not
only would the building be transformed, but all the attendees
would wear paper costumes to the party. When The Hartford
learned of the museum’s plan, the company said they would
not cover the event if anything happened. The museum didn’t
want to go uninsured a single moment because they housed
priceless artworks and antiquities. They pleaded with the
insurance company to negotiate with them. The Hartford
agreed to insure the party if all of the paper was doused in a
flame-retardant and there was no smoking at the event. The
museum agreed, and there was no fire at the party. The guests
all left safely. A lot of flame-retardants have since been found
to be carcinogenic and are no longer in use; that’s to say their
effects don’t outweigh their benefits. I had never thought that
the cost of insurance would justify its benefits. Up until the
fire, my experience has confirmed this thinking.

18

The Wadsworth prevented a fire from ruining its party, but our
fire wasn’t exactly that kind of preventable, at least not in the
same way, or in the way Jack Cassidy’s house fire was preventable; that is to say, nobody passed out drunk with a lit cigarette
dangling in his fingers. I smoke, and in the moments after I
was told our house was burning there was the question in my
mind as to whether or not one of my cigarettes could have
been the culprit. I heard a while back that there is a substance
put in the rings in cigarette paper which causes the cigarette to
stay lit. As I remember, I was hearing about this because the
added substance was just about to be, or had just been, outlawed. The cigarettes I smoke must not put these chemicals
in their paper because they don’t stay lit. I have never been
thankful for that before. I bet Jack Cassidy would have been
thankful.
If the fire had been set by one of my cigarettes I could
place blame somewhere and that would be an easy way to talk
about the fire. I could just say: “I stupidly started the fire
with one of my cigarettes.” That would solve both the how it
happened and also how I felt about it. Without a receptacle
in which to place my blame I have found myself, like Stuart,
contemplating whether any of my earlier actions could have
brought this on, although I have never been much of a believer
in karma.
I have tried to talk about the fire as a blessing, which is a
really optimistic way to look at things, and not how I usually navigate life. I did hear about a fire in 1996 that burned
12,000 acres of Colorado’s Mesa Verde, (formerly Pueblo
Indian land.) The blaze cleared most of the vegetation but left
most of the structures the Native Americans had built. The
fire discovered some 400 additional structures. Our fire, on
the other hand, revealed no ancient structures, and no historic
artifacts; it mostly revealed carbon. I could say my material
19

slate has been wiped clean, but the problem is that the slate
wasn’t wiped clean enough to really have a fresh start.
No matter how hard I try to make my house burning into
some type of revelatory landmark I run up against myself.
Maybe that’s because of the lack of discernable motivation behind the destruction. But I don’t think I can claim the absence
of intent as the only reason I am incapable of turning this story into one of revelation or progress. Like a drug addict who
can’t quit his drug until he’s truly ready to give it up, I can’t be
changed until I truly want to be. I was content where I was. I
had finally figured out a way to live in the place I inhabited.
This all leads me to believe that ultimately our house burning
down was no big deal. Life went on, back to school, work,
people, food, and cleaning. It is funny to think that we lost
our home, (and I am invoking also our symbolic place in the
world) and not much in us changed. Sure, we all had, and still
have, our moments of grief brought on by this incident, but
grief is a temporal condition. What did we really learn besides
never to leave the house with major appliances running? I am
not saying there were no big lessons in this, but we weren’t
exactly looking to learn. We were newlyweds in the midst of
appreciating life and one another. So, if we didn’t learn much
more than safety precautions, I can’t view this event as a big
deal, just loud.

20

Fig. 3

We’re Private People
and We’re Outnumbered
Anna Gray

The house on Cable Avenue was built in 1912 over the grave
of the Portland Heights Cable Car trestle, a precarious-looking
wooden structure that wound 1,040 feet over the hills to the
west of downtown Portland. The trestle was torn down after
only 14 years of operation, when the completion of the Vista
Bridge, in 1904, made it possible for an electric trolley to run
up into the SW hills, thus proving the somewhat dangerous
cable cars obsolete. They were burned for scrap metal. And
their route, the thoroughfare connecting the high places to the
downtown river valley, is now Cable Avenue: a steep one-lane
dead end street hedged in by false walls of Himalayan blackberry and English ivy. No one uses Cable Ave. except for
its handful of inhabitants and the occasional car full of high
schoolers who park their parents’ bmws in the secluded turnaround and smoke pot.
When I first went to look at the house on Cable, prior to moving in, I was charmed by the feeling that as soon as I entered
its doors I had disappeared. Like falling into a book, I instantly
22

forgot the surrounding outside or I worked it so seamlessly
into my own inside that it was imperceptible. It seems rare
these days to find an urban home that cultivates the experience
of disappearance and total privacy. This is not to be confused
with the sense of security one finds in today’s urban home.
The popularity of tall fences, alarm systems and caller i.d. is
evidence of a widespread dedication to prevent the invasion of
strangers. But, while these devices make it easier for an inhabitant to live in isolation, they do not make it easier to disappear.
Instead, they make one more aware of the encroaching outside.
Just as Ryan and I were settling into our apartment on the firstfloor of the house, my good friend sent me a first edition of
i: six nonlectures, by e.e. cummings. The six texts were compiled
from a series of talks that Cummings delivered at Harvard
University in 1952 and ‘53. I remember sitting at my desk and
copying down a passage from the second lecture onto a sticky
note. (The sticky note wasn’t quite big enough and that caused
me a fair amount of stress.) The words overflowed unneatly
onto two and then three yellow flakes of paper, which I stuck
in a row on the window molding in our studio. They stayed affixed for nearly a year until some cleaning spree ended them in
the recycling. They read:
Any apparent somewhere which you may inhabit is always
at the mercy of a ruthless and omnivorous everywhere.
The notion of a house, as one single definite particular
and unique place to come into, from the anywhereish and
everywhereish world outside—that notion must strike you
as fantastic. You have been brought up to believe that
a house, or a universe, or a you, or any other object, is
only seemingly solid: really...each seeming solidity is a collection of large holes—and, in the case of a house, the
larger the holes the better; since the principal function of
the modern house is to admit whatever might otherwise
remain outside...
23

Here, Cummings is speaking to what I assume is an audience
of students. He makes pretty decided assumptions about their
generation as a people whose experience and environment are
wholly divorced from his own, but beyond these assumptions
he talks about the growing loss of privacy and solitude in the
modern home, and the changes in collective conceptions of
habitable space. I especially identified with his bafflement at
the way modern structures embrace ‘porousness’ as an asset to
domestic living.
I loved the house on Cable partly because there was nothing
porous about it. It was somehow solid, cleverly installed on its
stilted dead-end perch, hugging the hillside like a bird’s nest
welded into the fork of a tree. Sheltered by the leaves of the
garden and the grade of the hill, we found an unspeakable
kind of privacy, a sealed solitude that had no holes until the
fire broke a few open.
To me, the house felt almost as if it hadn’t changed since
1912, though its many quirky reconstructions and garden were
a testament to its long life and composite development. It was
very much like the story of the little old house that insisted on
staying put while the city grew up around it. And the city had
grown up around this house. Just after the owner bought it,
over twenty years ago, the surrounding area began its transformation. One condominium went up behind, then an apartment building next door, and a few more down the street to
fill in the cracks. If you looked through the trees in our yard,
with their webs of climbing roses, you would see thick slabs
of vinyl siding, stretching their taupes and burgundies above
your head. If you leaned out over the side of the porch, you
could see your anonymous neighbors (surprisingly near) on
18th street below.
The house across the street from ours was built in the late
24

1890â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. It saw the cable cars transport passengers up the trestle
tracks past its doors, and probably saw the flames when they
reached our roof a hundred years later, hurling themselves up
from the basement stairs. So, when I say that we found privacy there, I know that what we had was an illusion all along,
because while the house was a bit hidden away, the neighborhood was quickly finding it.
On September 10th, years after our first days on Cable
Avenue, I finally met the neighbors. Fire is an irresistible
spectacle and the people on our block participated accordingly,
bringing chairs out onto their balconies and hovering in the
street long after the heat and smoke had cleared. Most I had
never seen before; they came offering apologies for something
they didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do, and asking questions about things I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think
they could possibly know about our lives.

It has been almost two months. The house stands now in
much the same state as it did just after the fire. The picture
windows lack glass, there are holes in the roof and the ceiling
melts down. The carpet is a dirty sponge. Everything drips.
I imagine mold grows. There is no sense to the way things
are arranged, a vacuum cleaner (fig. 20) lies half-melted in the
basement, its cord trails through a phantom wall and ends
somewhere on the other side of the house. Old drawings and
rubber stamps (fig. 16.2) litter the living room floor where
the wet couch is overturned and the walls are the least black.
There is a blackened cheese grater on the windowsill where my
e.e. cummings sticky notes once stuck. The images hanging
on the walls have been erased by smoke (fig. 8.1 and 8.2).
Upon entering the house for the first time hours after the
fire was extinguished, I was acutely aware of its aural changes.
There was no white noise, no fans, or refrigerator hum, nothing to mask the rush-hour clog of the freeway, the car doors
slamming two blocks down, or the voices on the street and
25

in the house above. The air inside the house was outside air.
With these observations came the realization that our lives
were suddenly perfectly visible, made legible to the gazes of
the numerous neighbors, workers, and onlookers who were
passing by.
Seeing our things displaced, divorced from their logical
domestic arrangements, was unnerving. In some places the
rearrangements were weirdly poetic and in others heartwrenching. All in all, it was a compelling mess. As we carried
salvageables outside and lined them up along the curb, a sort
of soggy, dirt-strewn index of our life began to appear. Each
object pointed back, referencing its place of function and
significance in our home. But that home had ceased to exist
as an idea, or a place, or an atmosphere. It existed now as a
collection of symbolic parts some damaged and disjointed,
others mysteriously untouched.
At this point, I decided I had to change my shoes. I had
been putting off their much-needed repair. The large holes I
had worked on adding to each sole, were letting in the broken
glass, the bits of charcoal and the water. They punctuated the
sudden permeability of our home.
Don’t misunderstand, it’s not that I am against holes, or windows, or ‘porousness’ in a house or in a shoe. It’s that there is
a queasiness in seeing a solid and much-loved thing so quickly
punctured.
In the past two months, while rolling the fire and its aftermath over in my mind, I have eroded an internal indentation,
an exposed patch, that marks the event. And, holes made like
that, by slow erosion or repetitive pressure are somehow easier
to deal with.
This book, in the words of Frances Stark, is as much about
feeling these holes, as it is about filling them.
26

The Glass of Water
by Wallace Stevens

That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.
Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws
And in the water winding weeds move round.
And there and in another state--the refractions,
The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind--But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,
But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and
dung,
One would continue to contend with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ideas.

Since September 10th, the house on Cable Ave. has been boarded
up. Preparations are being made for its reconstruction next year.
Anna and Ryan now live in a 416 sq. foot plywood garage-cabin,
full of bookshelves and cubby holes. It was frantically constructed
in the two weeks following the fire and fits their lives quite well
despite its lack of kitchen sink, toilet, or shower. Maggie and Brillo
Box seem to find it adequate as well. Their new home is located
on a quiet piece of property in SW Portland, which has been
owned and immaculately maintained by Kathie Gray for the last
twenty-nine years.
Stuart still resides in the downtown area, temporarily occupying a
condominium whose windows face west toward the Cable Avenue
hill. He makes frequent visits to his former home to tend the garden, and to save the place from its seeming abandonment.